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Midnight death knell for Excite@Home

When the clock strikes midnight tonight Excite@Home will cease operations. In the E@H bankruptcy proceedings, agreements with major affiliates promised uninterrupted services and continued delivery of @Home email until the end of February. Most of the former E@H customers have already been transitioned to other services, but those transitions have been all but smooth.

My broadband service was transitioned at the end of December and I've been on a network "100% managed by Comcast, so you can rest assured that you will never again worry about the strength or stability of your Internet provider." It has been a full two months on the new network and while speeds have stabilized, there are still problems with email, privacy issues, and lower levels of service after the transition. These problems have lead some customers to strike back at Comcast. With the impending shutdown of @Home email, Comcast's email servers were down for several hours last night and consistent email connection failures persist even at the time of this news post.

The demise of Excite@Home has taken the luster off of broadband which was once a geek nirvana. Fast download and upload speeds have now been capped, unlimited newsgroup access has now been outsourced with a 1GB/mo limit, web storage space has been lowered, and VPN access has been limited. All for the same price (or more in some places).

"I don't want to generalize, but the big cable guys' attitude seems to be, 'People should be happy that they have broadband access at all, regardless of customer service,'" said Mark Kersey, broadband analyst for La Jolla, Calif.-based research group ARS.

Some of the local Comcast representatives comments in the media back up the above quote. The lack of viable alternatives (other than dialup) are nonexistent for many, most cable broadband companies are local monopolies and unless you are near a CO, DSL may not be an option. On Tuesday, Comcast signed on with United Online Inc. opening up their network to competing ISPs. This is most likely Comcast throwing the FCC a bone in an effort to ease the Comcast/ATT Broadband merger scrutiny. Competition may be the only way for customers to get services at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, the services are only as good at the lines they are being offered over. When the lights to out in the Excite@Home offices at midnight...all of the former affiliates are all on their own.